In Season 4 of Bite Big, Amber Bonney took the podcast to London to sit down with some of the sharpest creative leaders in the world. Episode 6 brought her face to face with Vikki Ross, the brand, voice and copy consultant who has quietly shaped how some of the most iconic names in entertainment and luxury sound. Sky. BAFTA. ITV. IMAX. Range Rover. Defender. Discovery. Jaguar.
Much of that work exists under NDA. You’ve almost certainly encountered it without knowing. Which is, as Vikki herself would say, exactly the point. She came to the conversation not with a polished origin story, but with something more useful: a set of beliefs about what brand voice actually is, what it requires, and why the industry keeps getting it wrong.
Amber opened with Vikki’s mantra, “trust the process”, and Vikki immediately rewrote it. Too strategic, she said. Too controlled. The thing she’s actually lived by is closer to trusting the journey: staying open, following the thread, and resisting the urge to engineer an outcome. She’s never had a career plan. Her entire client list, Sky, JLR, all of it, arrived through some version of a happy accident. The JLR brief came because she’d been publicly critical of car advertising for years. Their approach? “We’ve seen what you say about car advertising. We don’t want you saying the same about us.” She took the brief. And delivered what she calls some of her best work. That patience isn’t passive. It’s the result of enough evidence that waiting, and staying curious, consistently leads somewhere worth going.
The episode goes deep on the craft, and it’s worth sitting with. Vikki’s process for finding a brand’s voice starts not with a brief but with looking backwards. What did the brand used to sound like? What language do they already own, even if they’ve forgotten it? With Range Rover, the answer was a wit and sophistication baked into their advertising from the 1960s to the 80s, copy so good, she told them, they could run it again today unchanged.
For JLR’s corporate rebrand, she interviewed around 100 people across the business and asked each one to describe their ideal brand voice in a single word. Every single person said the same word. She can’t reveal it, NDA , but the point stands: the voice was already there. It just needed someone to name it.
This is how Vikki works. Not by arriving with a voice and selling it in. By listening until the brand’s own truth becomes undeniable, and then giving it structure.
No conversation about brand voice in 2026 avoids AI, and this one didn’t. But Vikki’s take cuts through the noise. She’s not afraid of AI. She’s surprised it isn’t better.
Her observation on Virgin Voyages, a brand with one of the most distinctive voices in the world, who announced they’d successfully deployed AI to write in it, was blunt. She read the copy. It could have been any brand. The flair was gone. But here’s what she said next, and it’s the part worth keeping: that’s not just on the AI. It’s on the people who approved it.
Which leads to the more important question. Not “can AI write in a brand voice?” but “do the people responsible for your brand know your voice well enough to tell the difference?”
It’s why Vikki now writes her TOV guidelines with non-copywriters in mind. Less sexy. More practical. Built for the marketing manager who’ll be asked to send a customer email on a Tuesday afternoon with no creative support and a 20-minute window. If the guidelines don’t work for them, they don’t work.
One of the most quietly optimistic moments in the episode was Vikki’s read on where things are heading. She believes brands have been playing it safe for years, scared to stand for anything, scared to stand out. AI accelerated that. But now the data is catching up with the instinct, and brands are looking at the generic noise they’re making and deciding they want out.
Advertising Week Europe 2024: the theme was embrace AI. Advertising Week 2025: AI can’t do everything, and you still need human creativity and judgment. That shift, in one year, in one industry event, says something.
The copywriters who were let go because “AI can do it” are being hired back. Because it turns out that sounding like yourself, really, genuinely yourself, is something only humans know how to do. And the brands that figure that out first are going to have a significant advantage.
Vikki is a nervous public speaker. She got nervous on the way to the studio. She said so, plainly, without embarrassment. And then she explained the thing that gets her there anyway: she only speaks on things she has the experience to back. She’d never make a throwaway comment or criticise someone’s work unless she’d done the work herself.
That’s not confidence in the self-help sense. It’s the kind that compounds with evidence. You show up because you know what you know. You say it because you’ve earned the right to. The nerves don’t go away. You just have better reasons to speak anyway.
Want More?
🎧 Listen to the full episode; Amber Bites Big with Vikki Ross, via Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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